Peter's Blog

Questions regarding an individual’s identity are addressed millions, if not billions, of times a day.  E-commerce, healthcare, government and financial institutions, among others, must constantly address the question, “is this person who he/she claims to be?”  In an October 2012 presentation to the 2012 Open Cyber Security Summit, I stated that;
Getting the right human resources to the right place at the right time are challenges exacerbated by a disaster or large-scale medical emergency.  Technology utilized to notify, activate, deploy and track response personnel often does not actually verify that people are who they say they are and validate their skill sets and attributes.   From 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina to the Haiti Earthquake, there have been significant documented concerns with unaffiliated spontaneous and/or those claiming skills, training, licenses and certifications they do not possess.

The Federal Government creates standards and then spends hundreds of millions of dollars in redundant technology development in multiple silos across, and even within, agencies.  What is required is a fundamental change in culture towards the creation of tool kits and libraries concurrent with standards development.  This change has the potential of saving millions of dollars while speeding adoption and deployment exponentially. 

So, where do we start?  Open Source Technology to make it easier, quicker and cheaper to implement smart cards programs.  This is already common practice for database access, UI objects, and web service calls.  Identity security will be facilitated via  the creation of .Net®, Android®, and Apple®(iOS) applications that work with smart cards by leveraging easy to use tool kits.  The tool kits should be maintained by technologists that understand the underlying standards.  Providing a valid fully tested open source smart card SDK and libraries eases implementation and lowers cost.  This in turn will encourage the free market to provide solutions for the multitude of use cases that can be addressed by smart card technology by shifting the focus to business value.

Look for my next blog on smartcard technology!